Lambs of the Lamb

 

 

“All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; like a lamb led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth” (Isaiah 53:6 – 7).

 

“For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; we were considered as sheep to be slaughtered. But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:36 – 37).

 

“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

 

Are we lambs of the Lamb?

 

More precisely, are we sacrificial lambs of the Sacrificial Lamb?

 

Is it enough to read Isaiah 53 and say, “Here is evidence that Jesus is Messiah?” Is it enough to read Isaiah 53 and preach it as an evidentiary text?

 

Are we not called to believe into the Christ of the passage and surrender ourselves to Him, allowing Him to enter into us, living in us and through us to others?

 

If this is so, then what is this to look like? How is Christ Jesus to be manifested?

 

Are we not to lay down our lives for others, just as Jesus Christ laid down His life for us?

 

“This is my commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12 – 13).

 

“We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16).

 

And here is the thing dear friends, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us! Jesus teaches us that we are to love our enemies, blessing those who are opposed to us (Matthew 5:43 – 48), so that we may be the sons and daughters of the Living God. As the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ redeemed us, reconciling us to God when we were enemies of God (Rom. 5:10), so we are called to lay down our lives so that others may be reconciled. After all, we are the organic Body of Christ, are we not?

 

Note the emphasis on “He did not open His mouth,” in Isaiah 53:6 – 7. Consider that “Our griefs He bore and our sorrows He carried” (53:4), ponder “the anguish of His soul” (53:11), “He poured out His soul to death” (53:12), and “He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors” (53:12).

 

And then let us ask ourselves, “Is this a description of my life? Is this a portrayal of my local congregation? Is this how the professing church in America looks today?”

 

Dear, dear friends, what matters to the world…and I think to our Lord Jesus Christ, is not so much the evidence we have in linking the events of Isaiah 53 to those of Good Friday and Easter, but rather the evidence the world sees in our lives as we embody the sacrificial Lamb of Isaiah 53 – for this is indeed our calling. To have the former without the latter is to have a body without a soul.

 

In Romans 8:36 Paul brings his readers to the glorious fruit of the Gospel in our lives, the result of justification and sanctification, the glory of all that he has taught leading up to his quotation of Psalm 44:22, and that glory is that we follow the Lamb wherever He goes…and He goes to the Cross. The glory we lost in Romans 3:23 is eclipsed (if we can use such a term) in 8:28 – 39, for we enter into the koinonia of His sufferings (Phil. 3:10).

 

“To the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing, so that also at the revelation of His glory you may rejoice with exultation” (1 Peter 4:13).

 

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Colossians 1:24).

"Death works in us, but life in you" (2 Cor. 4:12).

 

Is Isaiah 53 a portrait of our lives?

O Jesus, please make it so.

Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship Part II – Reflections (34)

 

 

From page 241 through the first paragraph of page 245, Bonhoeffer explores the relationship between justification and sanctification. He begins with, “From now on, Christians in the New Testament are only named “the saints” (page 241).

 

After writing of baptism and justification, he writes of our preservation in God, “Living within this divine preservation is the process of sanctification” (page 241). We are placed in the Body of Christ through justification in Christ; we are preserved in the Body of Christ through sanctification in Christ.

 

“While justification incorporates the individuals into the church-community, sanctification preserves the church-community together with all the individuals” (page 242).

 

Bonhoeffer highlights the two elements of sanctification, being separated from the world and dedicated to Jesus Christ, and being made holy as our heavenly Father is holy. As he does this, he not only relates sanctification to the individual, but also to the church-community.

 

His confidence in God’s work of sanctification is expressed by the image of us being locked in a prison of the law and sin before coming to Christ, and of us now being “locked ‘in Christ,’ marked with God’s own seal, the Holy Spirit. No one may break this seal. It has been secured by God, and the key is in God’s hand” (page 242).

 

“This means that God has now taken possession of those whom God has gained in Christ” (page 242).

 

Bonhoeffer draws our attention to the sealing of Noah’s Ark, within and without with pitch for its preservation through the flood waters, so is the church-community sealed with redemption, deliverance, and salvation (pages 242-243).

 

Again, Bonhoeffer emphasizes that God’s People are “God’s earthly dwelling place, the place from which judgment and reconciliation go forth to all the world” (page 243).

 

Bonhoeffer does not limit sanctification to individual experience, as we may tend to, but contends that it is also the experience of the church-community. In fact, Bonhoeffer insists that if sanctification isn’t experienced within the church-community that it is “pious desires of religious flesh” and “mere self-proclaimed holiness” (page 244). His vehemence on this matter ought to give us pause to reconsider the highly individualized form of Christianity that many of us practice.

 

“Sanctification through the seal of the Holy Spirit always places the church in the midst of the struggle” (page 244). Bonhoeffer tells us that the struggle is to prevent the seal from being broken, from both within and without, it is the struggle for the earthly space that he has been writing about, it is the struggle for God’s holy realm on earth, it is the struggle for separation from the world (page 245).

 

On page 243 Bonhoeffer writes that the community of saints “implies three things.” A clear separation from the world. Holy conduct. The hidden work of sanctification “waiting for the day of Jesus Christ.”

 

The idea of separation from the world may be difficult to us to understand, so enmeshed are we in the world and its ways in our practice of what we term Christianity. Also, some of us have had the experience of equating separation from the world in terms of externals, of how we look on the outside – this was very much true of me in my early years.

 

Being separated from the world begins in our hearts and minds, it is a matter of the soul and spirit. We offer ourselves to God as living sacrifices so as not to be “conformed to the world,” but rather to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Romans 12:1 – 2).

 

We come to realize that the temple of God (whether individual or corporate) has no agreement, no meeting of the minds, with false gods. We must “come out from their midst and be separate” “cleansing ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Cor. 6:14 – 7:1). Note the tandem emphasis here on separation and holiness, the two dimensions of sanctification.

 

Again, this may be difficult when we are rooted in the things of this world: its values, priorities, communications, affirmations. When our eyes are fixed on the world we cannot really see our dear Lord Jesus. We become what we focus upon, we ought not to be so foolish to think otherwise. We cannot serve two masters, no matter how foolishly we argue otherwise. We can’t have dual citizenship with the Kingdom of Christ and the kingdoms of this world.

 

I could give example after example of how the professing church has brought idols into the Temple, of how we profane the sacred ground of our individual and collective lives and teach others to do so, but what matters is that we follow the Lamb wherever He goes for if we learn to follow Him all other things will be manifested for what they are; lies and chaff and sin and false teaching.

 

The people of the world don’t need us to be like them; they need us to be a holy People with a holy love and holy grace and holy mercy and holy truth in Jesus Christ. They don’t need our gatherings to be entertainment venues. Our classmates and coworkers and neighbors don’t need us to be chameleons, changing color and blending in with our surroundings, they need us to be distinctly identified with Jesus Christ (with all our warts and blind spots) caring for them, praying for them, living lives of truth and integrity – being in the world but not of the world.

 

We have been on a binge of trying to sell Jesus, and what we have done is sold ourselves and others to darkness. Instead of selling Jesus, we ought to be giving our lives to Him and to Him alone. There is nothing about the Cross of Crucifixion that lends itself to sales and marketing and shame on us for making the Gospel a form of cotton candy guaranteed to rot our souls.

 

“By His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord’” (1 Cor. 1:30 – 31).

 

“May it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14).